Watched this live not much more than an hour ago, and glad to see it here so soon. Was happy to hear Mann speaking perhaps a bit more strongly than he has in the past. but saying “we can prevent these changes from getting worse and worse IF…blah, blah” is not going to get it done.

The momentum built into the climate system and the inertia keeping us from moving fast enough call for stronger words—-we need Mann and other climate scientists to “do a Box” and talk about how we are on the verge of being truly F**Ked right now and try to get the public motivated

An international team of scientists has published a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) showing that even if the carbon emission reductions called for in the Paris Agreement are met, there is a risk of Earth entering what the scientists call “Hothouse Earth” conditions.

A “Hothouse Earth” climate will in the long term stabilize at a global average of 4-5°C higher than pre-industrial temperatures with sea level 10-60 m higher than today, the paper says.

The authors conclude it is now urgent to greatly accelerate the transition towards an emission-free world economy.

“Anyway, we’re clearly not content to stop at just 400 ppm. If we do, in fact, push CO2 up to around 1,000 ppm by the end of the century, the warming will persist and the earth will continue to change for what, to humans, is a practical eternity. And when the earth system finally does arrive at its equilibrium, it will most likely be in a climate state with no analog in the short evolutionary history of Homo sapiens. Most worryingly, the climate models that we depend on as a species to predict our future have largely failed to predict our sultry ancient past. And though the gulf is narrowing, and models are catching up, even those that come close to reproducing the hothouse of the early Eocene require injecting 16 times the modern level of CO2 into the air to achieve it—far beyond the rather meager doubling or tripling of CO2 indicated by the rock record.”

Redsky gets it. He and I could spend months giving links to the increasing body of evidence that things are bad and getting exponentially worse. This AM’s WashPost has an article on Death Valley setting another WORLD record for hottest month ever—-average temperature for July was 108.1 F, eclipsing the old world record of 107.4 F set in July of 2017. Can you extrapolate, children?—-to 109 F in 2019? To ??? in 2020?

The Chinese philosopher LAO TZU said it well in the 6th, century BC:
“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading”

In the case of AGW, it appears that he should have said (as Mann and the others should say) that we ARE going to end up where we are heading.